Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software fails. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where considerable volumes of information are stored. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often are unable to recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.